Monday, December 1, 2008

WoWMine is a relatively new player in the gold selling industry. It was founded in October 2005 by a team of professional Chinese WoW gold farmers who incorporated Super Continental Development Ltd. in Hong Kong, the US and Canada. It`s possible that a pre-registered and ready-made offshore company was used for this setup, which also explains the offtopic company name. WoWMine openly admits that they employ their own farmers and then sell directly to customers. Ridding the middlemen, the company is able to provide more competitive prices. WoWMine is the first ever to record delivery ETA statistics from past transactions.

On Alexa.com, which ranks websites according to their estimated traffic, WoWMine achieves rank 80,971, far behind IGE`s 26,670. Regardless, it is doing very well in the US attracting more than 40% of its web traffic from there. The company has received favorable reviews from various websites. Verigame.com gave it an excellent 4.3 out of 5 score and Wowgoldfinder.com ranks the company first ahead of five other well known sellers. Over 500 customers from Bizrate.com endorsed the positive reputation of the company with overall satisfaction of 82%.

Gordon Lam, the owner of WoWmine.com also runs other domains such as mmospa.com, l2mine.com, gwmine.com, ffmine.com, ddomine.com. Poster Kjkds from the Mmoglider.com forum suggested that Gordon Lam might own Mmoinn.com as well. According to the domain registration record, it belongs to Eric Lam who also owns a few other sites including Wowspa.com and Wowrex.com. Both of them are also involved in another company called Monocle Training which sells training manuals network gamers. Given the same surname and joint participation in this smaller project, it is likely that they are related.

Mmoinn has been reported as spamming in-game. Employees would whisper or send in-game mail to players with advertisements for mmoinn. This has caused a stir to groups of players. StopGoldSpam.com, a website dedicated to stopping gold spam has recorded the company in the spammers list. Players speak of the company in a negative way - like Roddry on World of Warcraft Vault: There are dozens of other sites that sell WoW gold but none of them spam in game constantly like MMOINN. Bad reports spread fast: From the Horde Army forum to the Official World of Warcraft forum.

One of the ways the company gets goal is buying from Chinese gold vendors or off players that wish to sell gold to them online. All you need is to establish a seller account with the website, you will be able to see how much gold and at what price the gold is being exchanged for real money. Not everyone has access to this option - especially Chinese gold farmers who can not communicate well in English as described by this independent vendor. This is where a middleman comes in, takes orders and buys gold from other Chinese farmers and then sells it with a 15-20% profit to MMOINN.com. Of course, MMOINN.com then marks it up even further before selling it to the end user.